Luigi de Cambray Digny

Luigi de Cambray-Digny (February 14, 1778 – February 22, 1843) was an Italian neoclassical architect, landscape designer and teacher, active in Tuscany between the end of the seventeenth century and the mid-1800s.

Biography Luigi de Cambray Digny was born in Florence on February 14, 1778. This important department controlled all public building within the Grand Duchy. De Cambray-Digny was a prolific architect; he undertook many works of restoration and adaptation of public and private buildings in Florence and Prato as well as projects for the building of the port, the shipyard and the area to the north of the Via Grande (1817) in Livorno; he also built the Filigare Customs House (1818) at the Passo Appenninico della Raticosa, the churches of Santa Maria Assunta (1822–7), Montecatini, and Santi Pietro e Paolo (1829–35), Livorno, and a number of important theatres, including the Teatro Metastasio (1827–30) in Prato.

His early neoclassical style is particularly evident in the hunting lodge of Montili (1818), which stands above the park of the former Villa Medici in Pratolino, and the Loggia Reale (1819–27), Via del Prato, Florence. Garden design was an important aspect of his career; three of his best-known gardens, for the Orti Oricellari (1813), the Marchese Pietro Torrigiani (1813–14), both in Florence, and the Puccini di Scornio (1821–8) at Pistoia, were transformed into romantic parks, with architectural additions following the philosophical and symbolic tendency, particularly masonic, in Tuscan architecture that was invented and championed by Giuseppe Manetti.

Many drawings for unexecuted official projects survive in Florentine archives; they combine a grandiose urban vision typical of the Napoleonic years with Vitruvian classical motifs. Luigi de Cambray Digny died in Florence on February 22, 1843. His son, Luigi Guglielmo Cambray-Digny, was the first mayor of Florence and Minister of Finance of the Kingdom of Italy from 1867 to 1869.